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Tag Archives: Arab Israeli Wars

I’ve spent a few days digging through old maps of the Middle East. Not literally digging through paper maps, mind you that sounds like some real fun. I want to find maps that are free and downloadable (this project is without funding). More to the point, I’ve been looking for decent quality, historical maps that cover the areas of the Arab-Israeli wars.

A book like Chaim Herzog’s The Arab-Israeli Wars provides decent maps of the military situation, but a wargamer wants more. We want data. We want topography. We want the exact location of the dirt roads and their intersections. We want it all.

Google Maps/Google Earth provides wargamers with an amazing resource. It is difficult to overstate its impact compared to the olden days of the previous century. We can immediately see where a battle took place, anywhere in the world, with just a few clicks of the mouse. The problem, of course, is that we see what the battlefield looks like now. It may have looked nothing like that when the fighting actually took place. While we shouldn’t be surprised that this is the case for ancient battles, it is sometimes hard to grasp how much has changed even without our own lifetimes. For example, the little town where I went to high school is already, since I’ve been out of school, becoming unrecognizable to me. That for an area unimpacted by any major, culture-changing events. For any locale that has undergone political upheaval and hot flashes of the Cold War, there are bound to be some fundamental changes in terrain, population, and infrastructure.

This is what has me digging up maps with which to enlighten myself about the Six-Day War. The population of Israel has tripled since the end of that war (compare to a little more than 33% growth for the whole of the United States). This means both extensive expansion of preexisting cities as well as settlement and cultivation of previously empty landscapes. Moreover, in barely more than a century, that land has moved from being a backwater of the Ottoman Empire, to a protectorate of Great Britain, to a modern, first-world (in many ways) European nation. Roads have been built, abandoned, and/or replaced major highways. Railways which crossed the land and were destroyed by successive wars. Centuries-old villages were abandoned. Land that was once empty desert may now hold modern subdivision and other towns may now have reverted farmland.

I started my journey down this road when I decided to try my hand at scenario making for the 1956 war. My “time shift” in that case was forward. I was starting with Command Ops 2, which is a World War II game. The challenge, therefore, was bringing things forward but it only was only forward by a decade. Furethermore, even in 1956, the combatants were still using WWII surplus equipment and technology, so the technology shift was a lot less than what might have been expected, say, in Europe.

In terms of terrain, I had similar advantages. I didn’t write about it at the time, but I continued with the development of that Bir Gifgafa scenario beyond what I recorded here. (I probably owe you guys an update.) For reasons that should be pretty obvious, the British government conducted extensive surveys between the World Wars and then, during WWII, distributed detailed topographical maps of the region. The U.S., in turn, had a series of maps portraying the region in the late 1950s, meaning the surveys were roughly up-to-date relative to the Suez Conflict.

The U.S. maps are at a wider scale (1:250,000 versus 1:100,000). This is mitigated by the paucity of features in the deep Sinai as well as pretty good detail on the maps (50 meter contour for the topography). The 1967 war, however, did not limit itself to the Sinai, and so I’m revisiting some of what I learned in my previous go around.

Some of you may recall that when I played the Star and the Crescent scenario for the Bir Gifgafa battle, I took issue with the map. My snarky remarks are hidden in there among my many complaints and so is easy to miss. In The Star and the Crescent’s map, an airfield that shouldn’t exist yet* features as the ground over which the battle is fought.

How this happened is obvious. The real prize when it comes to Cold War maps of Israel are the Soviet military maps of the late 1980s or early 1990s. there is a series at 1:50,000 scale and another at 1:100,000. As long as you have a passing ability to sound out words written in Cyrillic, the maps are easy enough to read. Though written in Russian, the place names are nearly identical to what was used on the British and U.S. maps (and would be used by English speakers today). Given such fined-grained detail, these are the maps you want when trying to visualize, accurately, the topography.

There’s an interesting story being told here. The great power influence over the Middle East is depicted through the desire for military grade maps of the area. The intensity of that interest might well be gauged from the scale of their maps. I’d write more about that, but I’m sure it would sound less and less profound as I babbled on.

Getting back on track, the problem with those Soviet 1:50,000 maps is the very thing that I’ve been talking about. They are anywhere-up-to four decades out-of-date, depending on what war you are exploring. So in 1956 and in the Sinai, you have a airfield where then there was none. That detail aside, the map isn’t actually that bad. The area is mostly empty terrain; in 1948, in 1956, in 1967, and today. Move your focus north to the West Bank, however, and there are going to be significant differences between each and every one of the periods. The land itself transitioned from British protectorate to a part of Jordan and then to Israeli occupation. In particular, the 1948 war resulted in Arab villages being depopulated and abandoned and the 1967 war resulted in the building of modern, western subdivisions, construction of a very different character than the Arab villages or even the pre-WWII Israeli settlements.

Knowing that maps exists for the different periods is only half the battle. Finding them is the other half.

The two major repositories of scanned maps are at the University of Texas (https://legacy.lib.utexas.edu/maps/) and at https://maps.vlasenko.net/. The former has a large collection of paper maps in Austin at the Perry-Castañeda Library. The website explains they have scanned in about 20% of what they have in the physical library. As you can see from the first link, I have stuck to the “legacy” website, which provides a set of pages for finding lists of maps by topic. This is being replaced by a new database portal (https://geodata.lib.utexas.edu/), although it doesn’t seem like I’m the only one who is happier with the old way. The Vlasenko website focuses on maps from the Soviet Union.

The key, of course, with only a fraction of maps scanned in is to know what is out there and what isn’t. For that, I have found the index at the John R. Borchert Map Library at the University of Minnesota (https://www.lib.umn.edu/borchert/topographic-maps-online) to be helpful. Two links from that website that are of tremendous value takes you to a Colorado School of Mines database interface. I’m not sure how to access the ArcGIS program more directly. It asks for a password when I try to navigate from the top down and I don’t see another way to get into what CSM set up. There are, however, two links from Minnesota to Colorado’s ArcGIS, one for 1:50,000 to 1:125,000 and one for 1:200,000 to 1:253,440**. These provide an interactive, map-based access – albeit mostly to the same scanned libraries as indicated previously.

The interfaces are well worth exploring deeper, but I think everything that I’ve found applicable I’ve downloaded from either the U. Texas or the Vlasenko site, and all accessible through the ArcGIS program – with one exception. For the Six-Day War, I really wanted a map of the West Bank from the late 1950s. This seemed to be covered by a 1:250,000 topographical map of the West Bank, although indications were that it was paper only. My search results suggested that it was paper map in the Soviet archive, but I think those were red herrings. After some skrying for the meaning of the various codes in the map name, I learned that it was one of the American surveys from the early 1950s. U. Texas has an index map that makes it clear what they are missing from that series. Berkley, by contrast, has a scan of what appears to be a government index map to be used for ordering paper copies, although they don’t have scans of the individual map. This suggested that the map does exist and I doubled my efforts to find it. Fortunately, the Australian National University came to my rescue with a high-resolution scan of the missing map.

There. Now you know everything that I know about Middle East maps and then some. I’ll be back with some of what I’ve been doing with all these maps. I’m sure you’ll be on the edge of your virtual seats until then.

*By the Six-Day War, the airfield had been built. Sharp eyed observers will have picked it out in a screenshot of the 1967 battle at Bir Gifgafa, which I played using Divided Ground.

**Love that precision. I tried to search out what map is actually at the 1:254,440 scale and couldn’t find it. It also makes me wonder what excluded at that upper end.

The TOAW scenario for the war in the West Bank provides an overview of the fighting the meshes very well with the narrative from Chaim Herzog’s The Arab-Israeli Wars: War and Peace in the Middle East. I suspect that a key reason for that is that good sources for tactical details may be a little thin on the ground and that the scenario is sourced, to a large extent, from the very text that I am reading.

While it is authored by a different person, this West Bank scenario makes a fine accompaniment to the Sinai front scenario which I had played earlier. I’m being a little glib about the “single source” for scenario development. He explains that this scenario is originally based on the 1977 Mark Herman board game The Battle for Jerusalem 1967. However, the notes also cite a number of sources used to update using information that has become available in the 30 years since the board game’s publication. Arab-Israeli warfare stands in contrast to American engagements, like Vietnam, where there is extensive written detail from both the military and the memoirs of veterans.

Coinciding with reality, the Jordanians are considerably easier to deal with than the Egyptians were. In Sinai 67, early tactical achievements were necessary to demoralize the Egyptians and force them to withdraw. Without that historical advantage, it becomes very difficult to beat the scenario. In West Bank 67, although there are a few challenging fights here and there, it is relatively easy to steadily force Jordan from the West Bank. The game makes clear that key element in the Israeli victory was the mastery of the air. Interdiction prevents Jordan and Iraqi reinforcements from coming into play and limits the ability of Jordan to maneuver defensively.

Heavy fighting in Jerusalem’s Old City.

I’ll highlight a couple more remarkable features of this scenario. The design is more “zoomed in” than what seems “normal” to me. Comparing West Bank 67 with Sinai 67, the map scale is the same for both, but the unit “counters” are a level finer grained. Whereas in the Sinai, we mostly maneuvered at the battalion level, in the West Bank we move individual companies. Comparing with the Vietnam Combat Operations series and its more encompassing map (2.5 km versus 4 km), the unit scale differential is also similar. This may not seem like a big deal, but when you see a recon unit with only 3 vehicles total, it doesn’t feel like a typical TOAW game. Compare also with the Middle East ’67, where the map is zoomed in (1.6 km / 1 mile) but the unit representation is larger.

A tank company survives the war intact.

Another impression is that West Bank 67 gets the dynamics of the war about right. Even as the scenario came to an end, Israel retained her fighting power. In other words, the campaign didn’t just turn into a battle of attrition. Israeli units are capable of completely annihilating their counterparts while surviving relatively unscathed. This is contrast to most TOAW scenario as well as scenarios from other engines. The downside to this is it seemed almost impossible not to achieve a decisive victory. Both the scenario notes and the victory screen make it clear that Jordan will be crushed. Even with a decisive victory, you have simply matched the performance of the Israeli forces in the Six Day War.

The 1947 partition plan for Jerusalem had it mostly surround by Arab national territory; that controlled by Jordan. While Jerusalem was planned to be an “international city,” it was boarded by Arab on almost every side. During the fight for independence, a significant portion of the Israeli effort was the opening and then defense of supply lines between the Jewish cities on the coast and the enclaves in Jerusalem. The Armistice of 1949 saw Israel holding on to those areas that she controlled, militarily, at the time of the signing. Continuing through the period of 1956 war, while Jerusalem remained a divided city and Israel maintained their overland supply routes, the Holy City appeared more a part of Jordan than Israel. Likewise, despite significant losses of Arab-administered territory in the Independence War, Jordan still controlled the West Bank.

In hindsight, the portion of the Six Day War fought between Israel and Jordan might have been avoided. Although one of the triggers of the war was Jordan joining Syria and Egypt in an anti-Israel defensive pact, Jordan’s King Hussein was hesitant about this arrangement. The King had made negative comments about Nasser’s motivations and had, privately to Western diplomats, worried about Arab-nationalist “hysteria.” He signed the agreement with Egypt on May 30th partly out of concern of appear “soft” in the eyes of the Arab world. In doing so, he also accepted the appointment of General Riadh, an Egyptian general, to command the Arab coalition on the Jordanian front.

Jordan’s role in Nasser’s plan was to divert attention and forces away from the Egyptian attack through the Sinai. Jordan was not expected to mount a major offensive of their own. Eventually Jordanians would meet up with the advancing Egyptian armies and combine their efforts to defeat Israel.

The Israel high command understood that Jordan was a side-show in their confrontatino with Egypt and Syria. Israel made overtures toward Jordan as late as June 5th, assuring King Hussein that Israel would not attack Jordan if Jordan did not, themselves, initiate hostilities. King Hussein’s hesitency, however, was overcome by the agreement he had signed with Egypt and through assurances offered him by President Nasser in a June 5th phone call.

When Israel launched their attack, grounding the Egyptian air force, it caused massive confusion within the Egyptian command. Dispatches to Nasser and the military high command in Egypt reported decisive Egyptian victories, victories quite at odds with the rather grim reality. Nasser relayed the news of this phantom Egyptian success to Jordan, encouraging them to launch their supporting attack. With Israeli on the verge of destruction (or so it seemed), Hussein joined in and so set in motion the loss of the West Bank.

Jordan’s war opened with a bombardment of Israeli positions in Jerusalem (as well as other cities) and the seizure of the neutral “Government House” just to Jerusalem’s south. This complex was the residence of the British High Commissioner of Palestine during the mandate which became a DMZ during the Independence War. At that time, the UN took it over and made it the headquarters of the UN Truce Supervision Organization. Its seizure by Jordan gave Israel a justification for counter action. Israel responded with a rapid assault, expelling the Jordanian forces from the UN’s territory and then continuing southward to the Arab village of Zur Baher. With that move, Israel now controlled the main road headed south from Jerusalem, making it that much more difficult for the Jordanians to link up with the Egyptians.

I must take the sausage.

Divided Ground provides a Jerusalem scenario where, as the Israeli player, you must take control of the Government House and then push southward to dislodge the Jordanians from additional strong points. The scenario is called The Hill of Evil Council. This is a name for the neighborhood the Arabs call Abu Tor (Father of the Bull) with the hill being Jebel Deir Abu Tor (Mountain of the Monastery of Abu Tor). The sinister reference is to the legend that this was where Joseph ben Caiaphas lived, Caiaphas being the priest and political leader who organized the conspiracy to have Jesus turned over to appease the Romans.

This is a small scenario. Notice the operational area in the above screenshot* is a four-by-five hex area. Constrained as the scenario is, it does a decent job of reproducing a semi-urban warfare at the platoon level. This map is but a fraction of a larger Jerusalem map that was intended to be shipped as a scenario in Divided Ground. Release pressures meant that the more ambitious scenario remaining unfinished. Instead, the Divided Ground provided two small Jerusalem 1967 scenarios, this and one focused on the Old City.

It is scenarios like this one that make me wish for continued development and support for the Divided Ground system leaving me to wonder if I shouldn’t be playing Campaign Series Middle East. Then I play a different scenario.

A meeting engagement produces many a burning wreck.

After I finished the The Hill of Evil Council scenario, I also played the 1967 war’s version of Bir Gifgafa. My (statistically suspect) experience is that the majority of the Divided Ground are more like the latter. In so many of the scenarios, the losses on both sides are overwhelming. While I managed to take out the bulk of the Egyptian force around the Bir Gifgafa airfield, I ended up losing every single tank under my command. Is this just bad play on my part? Maybe, but the experience just doesn’t feel very historical.

This counter experience, plus the price tag, once again leaves me concluding that Campaign Series Middle East is not for me.

One of my disappointments with ME67 and its treatment of the Six Day War was that I felt there was a mismatch between Tiller’s Modern Campaigns mechanics and the nature of this war. The Tiller algorithms lean towards a steady attrition in strength and morale and this seems to miss when portraying the rapid maneuver that characterized Israel’s successes during this fight. As a way to explore this potential gap, we might explore tactical-level representations of these same fights.

As before, the starting point for tactical warfare in the Levant seems to be the Avalon Hill The Arab Israeli Wars. I imagine that the extensive order-of-battle research done in the development of the board game is too valuable a resource to not use. Whatever the reason, the availability of computer scenarios seem to flow from that Avalon Hill Rule Book.

The Sh’ot Meteor is the Israeli designation for the British Centurion.

First on my plate is a Steel Panthers scenario which offers itself to be a version of the AH scenario A-4 Rafa. Or, as the scenario text says, it is “inspired” by the AH scenario. A-4 is intended to portray the rapid seizure of Egyptian strong points just across the international border where land meets sea. The setup uses three boards but, in an tA-I Wars twist, the boards aren’t actually connected. The Israelis (and Egypt’s main battle tank force) can move from board to board in a Westerly direction, but not directly. They require a transition turn to bridge the gap between boards.

The Steel Panthers version is different, it explicitly has two axes of attack for the Israeli advance, crossing the screen diagonally from upper right to lower left. My guess is it is an attempt to recreate the first day or two of the Israeli advance into the Sinai in miniature. I’ll not try to back up my speculation, but the Steel Panthers map looks more like the northeastern Sinai than it does the immediate vicinity of Rafah. Based on this observation, I’m going to assume this scenario neither reproduces the board game scenario nor does it accurately simulate details from the June 5th battle. So what does it do for us?

Mile-long shots were pretty effective, circa 1967.

First of all, it shows us the beauty of Steel Panthers when it comes to armored combat in the desert. Sight lines routinely extend for a mile or two and the British 105mm L7 tank can make short work of even a concealed and protected enemy at these great distances. In doing so, it demonstrates the rapidity with which a small mountain of Egyptian armor can be dispatched. It also demonstrates one of the more frustrating aspects of desert warfare in Steel Panthers – the sand. I’m constantly getting stuck in the sand! It feels (I didn’t count) like I lost as much as a third of my armored fighting vehicles to sand-initiated mobility kills. Is this realistic? I have no idea, but if that much armor was really disabled during an attack by nothing more than sand, you’d think it would be notable.

Of course, it could be just bad playing on my part. This is always a distinct possibility. You can see on the screenshots, the terrain is made up of basic desert terrain and “soft sand” (especially below you can see the ripply graphic in some hexes). I tend to be a lot more focused on avoiding mines and vulnerable exposures, so I wasn’t paying close attention, but it would make sense that it is that soft sand that is doing me in. The own-side AI does not seem to consider “soft sand” as a obstacle when calculating your path. If so, game play might require being very deliberate when moving in the vicinity of this hidden tank killer. Maybe next time I can be more observant.

On the other end of the mile-long kill shots.

So that’s worth something, but fortunately it isn’t all. The Steel Panther scenario list contains another opportunity to compare and contrast different approaches in this battle. The 4th scenario in the MBT package is called Egyptian Armor — Six Day War (see screenshot above). Its the same battle as before, but played* from the Egyptian side. I was surprised to see a scenario designed to be played from the defense. Typically, an AI has trouble handling offensive maneuvers, even when that same AI is capable of reasonably mounting a static defense. Perhaps, in this case, this natural advantage is intended to be mitigated by the fact that the player takes the role of the underdog. We do all remember this was, historically, a lopsided Israeli victory, right?

Despite the differences, it is immediately apparent that I’m playing the other side of the same battle. I start out with a nice array of Soviet armor plus foot soldiers ready to engage the Israeli assault in the open. Much like when I was playing as Israel, there is some initial success as I catch the Israeli armor by surprise. In this scenario it is obvious, even more so than the first time around, that it is the Israeli air superiority that turns the tables. Once the Israeli jets start streaking through, they manage to kill everything they target. And once Israel gets rolling, their armor can maneuver freely and basically take out everything I’ve got. Even so, that only gets them about halfway there.

Dug in at Rafah Junction.

My second defensive line is at Rafah Junction (above), where I’m dug into prepared positions. Naturally, I’m not going to be maneuvering any of these units, so this part of the game is one of waiting until Israel comes in range. There are couple of things to note here. First of all, compare the layout of the map to the original. In particular, notice the mini-map if you can make it out. What you are looking at it a road leading from the international border southwest to Rafah Junction, after which it splits. If you compare this to any of the screenshots from my operational games, you’ll see this is a much more accurate representation. In the first of the two above screens, you’ll also see a black line on the north edge which, when shown in the main view, is not a road. This is the coastal railroad and it is in its historical place. If I had scrolled even further northward, you would have been able to see the Mediterranean Sea on the map. Second lesson from this scenario, and a unique less on at that, is that it demonstrates how the Israelis planned their attack, not along the expected route, but through the open desert. The bulk of my fixed positions in Rafah Junction will turn out to be nearly worthless as the Israeli tanks come at them from the side.

In the end, this scenario was a moderate victory for me giving me the pleasure of bucking history. Unfortunately, the credit goes more to the weakness of the AI than my own tactical prowess. After wiping out my first line, the Israeli’s AI could not quite pull together a coordinated attack within the time limit set by the scenario. By the end, I was still on the losing end of most fights, but the Israeli’s never made it to my defenses. It didn’t help that, once the Israeli Air Force knocked out all of my tanks, they began taking out their own. Clearly the AI isn’t quite up to this challenge. I will take the word of the scenario designer, though, and without trying to play it, assume that the AI would do even worse trying to run the Egyptians.

Recreating the board.

The best version of this battle came from an unexpected direction. I also pulled out Divided Ground: Middle East Conflict 1948-1973. Then I loaded that game’s recreation of said-same board game scenario A-4 Rafa. You might recall the series I wrote about earlier where the The Arab-Israeli Wars scenarios are recreated as accurately as possible by Alan R. Arvolds. In this case, I’ve made no attempt at setting up** the table-top game boards to compare – I’ll take it on faith that the reproduction is accurate. It sure looks right.

One surprising thing here, though, is that Divided Ground has very much the same feel as the WinSPMBTEgyptian Armor scenario. Surprising, for one, because this map (above) is not an attempt to reproduce the area around Rafah Junction – it’s reproducing Arab-Israeli Wars where all of the Middle East is created by four “geomorphic” boards. Nevertheless, I actually do feel that I’m playing the Israeli side of the Egyptian Armor scenario. Second surprise is that I can actually see the AI opponent doing something. In this case, it is retreating, which isn’t exactly “smart, aggressive AI,” but retreating is just what I did when I played the Egyptians. After knocking out some Israeli tanks during their initial advance, the smart move seems to fall back on a better defensive line. I wasn’t very successful with this in Steel Panthers, but the Divided Ground AI seems to be making a decent go of it.

One of the complaints about the scenarios in The Arab Israeli Wars is that they tend to all favor the Israeli player. I would have expected this to exasperated to twice over here. Beyond the original scenario balance, you also have the advantage of playing against a computer AI. Furthermore, it is a situation (including things like AI but also setup and unit mix) that was created for a different gaming platform (the board, the dice, and the odds tables) than how it is being implemented (Divided Ground). Instead, I found myself playing a pretty tough game. I try to advance semi-cautiously, but seem to be failing. It is difficult to cover the board rapidly enough to win and I know in my gut I am moving too slowly but, at the same time, as I venture forward, I’m losing a many a unit to ambushes and long-shot kills. To win (and lets ignore scoring in this calculation) the Israeli has got to traverse the whole map while achieving minimal losses – and that would seem to be quite the challenge.

Israel doesn’t have the massive air power that the Steel Panthers version featured and, unlike in Egyptian Armor, the Egyptians have fairly effective artillery. It’s a debate that is well outside the scope of this post, but there is a greater question of just how effective artillery is and/or was. In Divided Ground, or at least in this here scenario, the answer is that the artillery is pretty durned effect, possibly more so than in alternative engines. Finally, besides the TOAW Sinai scenario itself, this is the only version of this battle that really captures the required speed with which the player must slice across the battlefield. In this, I think it is uniquely (at least, in my trials so far) a key element of this fight and this campaign.

Divided Ground does some good stuff in terms of modeling. It’s use of 3D and sound, dated as it may be, somehow forms more of a connection that so many of the alternatives. It helps that someone has taken the time to convert every one of The Arab-Israeli Wars, making them available for solo play. The drawback is that I’m on an ancient computer (that I shouldn’t even be running anymore) fighting a decades-old user interface. I find myself,once again, wondering if I shouldn’t be springing for the reworked version of Divided Ground.

*That’s not quite right, now is it. In Steel Panthers, all scenarios can be played from either side or as a player-on-player game. Frequently the scenario designer makes a recommendation of how his creation will work best when played against the UI. In this case AIW: Rafa is intended to be played as Israel and Egyptian Armor by Egypt, so I’ll take the liberty as treating them as a playable only from that side.

**One thing I did do was download the Vassal module for the game. It is still quite a bit of work to set up a scenario in The Arab-Israeli Wars with Vassal because most of the scenarios are free set-up. Perhaps is some future post, however, I’ll being inspired to compare directly with the board game version knowing that I don’t have to protect it from dog, cat, and family members while I’m fiddling with my stacks of counters. I have to imagine I’d be a lot happy with Campaign Series: Middle East 1948-1985 installed on my “real” computer. But $40 for a 19-year-old expansion to the 1997 East Front? How does one justify such a thing?

Like I said, I’m going to play some of these scenarios while reading the appropriate sections from the book The Arab-Israeli Wars: War and Peace in the Middle East, by Chaim Herzog. I’ve just finished the section on the Sinai Campaign and am wrapping up a pair of operational scenarios dealing with that same front. One is in The Operational Art of War (TOAW) and one in Modern Campaigns – Mideast ’67 (ME67) .

The TOAW scenario Sinai 1967 focuses on creating a single-player experience for an Israeli player who must reproduce the lightning campaign through the Sinai desert from the Six Day War. It’s a scenario that’s interesting because of its limitations. The ME67 scenario, Gaza and Beyond, is even more limited but it far more traditional in its design. First to TOAW .

Day 1, assault on Rafah.

Sinai 1967 has a nicely developed designer-notes package with historical background, instructions, and design philosophy. I’ll try not to simply repeat that information here. Essentially, the idea is to ask the player to repeat Sinai campaign, conquering the entire peninsula in a mere six days. The war opens with a theater-wide airstrike that hands Israel nearly complete domination of the air and, with that executed, the scenario opens. In addition to air superiority, Israel has an opening shock bonus to simulate the surprise of their attack and the confusion of the Egyptian forces.

Killing tanks near Kuntillah.

The scenario is built around the key locations seized by Israel and the resultant shock and confusion this caused in the Egyptian command. If the player takes the historic junctions by the morning of the second day, Egyptian field marshal Mohamed Abdel Hakim Amer will panic and attempt to withdraw the Egyptian forces from the Sinai. If not, the player must fight an alt-history battle where the Egyptian forces contest the Sinai and recover from their initial panic.

Morning of the second day and I didn’t make it.

Looking at the above screenshot, taken in the morning on June 6th, I am a bit behind schedule. Historically, the Israeli’s had taken Rafah on the 5th and by the morning of the 6th were ready to launch into Al Arish. My forces were still undertaking mop-up operations at dawn in the Rafah vicinity, meaning I had no hope of capturing Al Arish on the historic time table. However, take a look at these dispositions, because I think they will look familiar later on.

This is what creates the depth for this scenario. There are essentially two sets of deadlines. The first is to capture enough in the first day of the war to achieve the requisite “shock and awe.” Depending on whether you have, you then have one of two end games. In one, you pursue a fleeing Egyptian Army towards the Suez Canal, attempting to reproduce the second half of the Israeli campaign. In the second, Egypt has decided to stand and fight, and you see how effective you are against that tactic.

As I write this, I am attempting to get a win under that second set of conditions. What I’m finding is Israel is heavily weighted towards the north. While I am pressing forward there, I am taking a pounding in the south, where Egypt is refusing to turn tail and run. I’m also running against that perennial opponent in TOAW, the supply system. Supply is a critical component of the TOAW modeling and, by the end of the second day, my supplies very much depleted in my combat forces. Resupply is done through the system and is controllable only indirectly, through maintaining ownership of hexes between units and their supply sources. To make a long story short, I’m not sure that I can get my units resupplied in time to be effective in a six day war. Nor am I sure whether my resupply problems accurately reflect the constraints on the Israeli command. Nonetheless, this is a recreation of this campaign that illuminates the historical factors.

Opening moves.

ME67 is, at the same time, both a more interesting and a less interesting take on this battle. We see a scale that is still at that operational level, although a slightly finer grain than TOAW. You may recall a discussion on scope and scale when we fought over this very same ground back in 1956. I had been pleased with the explicit treatment of day/night cycles before. While it remains a clear discriminator, I wasn’t as excited about it this time. Is it too much detail to have me engage in a night turn without asking me to explicitly manage how I disengage and then reengage the at dawn? This case makes me wonder if it isn’t better abstracted away?

Another obvious difference is in the graphical interface and the feedback it provides. ME67 abstracts each unit as a primary weapon. See for example the above screenshot (clicking should display full scale), where the 82nd Tank Battalion is represented as 52 Centurion tanks. Compare and contrast that with TOAW. In Sinai 1967, the 82nd is represented as two different counters and details not only the tanks, but the halftracks, armored cars, infantry, and mortars allocated to the formation. The key advantage for ME67 is that the “tank” representation is very visual. As I watch my vehicles fall by the wayside, I’m getting some immediate feedback on the health of my force. TOAW‘s accounting is more detailed (see, particularly, the Loss Report screenshot further up), but it is considerably less visceral. Whether one is a more accurate simulation than the other depends on your thoughts about the relative merits of Tiller’s algorithms versus Kroger’s.

Orientation.

My play was inhibited by a lack of familiarity with the Tiller UI system. It always takes me a few scenarios to remember how the little icons interact with the UI. Worse are the functions that aren’t tied to the little icons. For example, it was Turn 5 before I remembered how to turn on the map labels (and experience I found illuminating enough to include as its own screenshot, left). I continue to have trouble with “on foot” versus “travel mode.” Are they meant to be used separately? I decided to focus entirely on “travel” mode (an icon that looks to me like some sort of Wiccan pentagram), but even then I have considerable trouble remembering to bring units in and out of the mode as I would consider appropriate.

Final situation, west of el Arish.

For all of my little blunders, I managed to bring my forces near the last two objectives (just outside of el Arish) on the final turn, having captured the major objectives further to the East. This is very, very similar to the third screenshot from TOAW, above, but (once I get over the non-American date style) exactly one full day behind schedule. Even still, this earned me a major victory.

That brings me to my biggest complaint here. For all that the game/scenario is getting right, in the end it leaves the impression of simply an implementation of one particular battle in the Tiller engine. Whereas TOAW sets the play some specific goals – meeting the historical timetables to gain historical advantages, ME67 lacks that unique feeling. It’s not that its bad. It has the right units, the right map, and a pretty effective scope/scale. But the gameplay style involving the surround of the enemy hex followed by multi-turn attrition of the defending unit – this seems more than a bit out of place in the lightning war that was that of the Six Days.

The human mind is designed to create patterns, even when those perceived patterns don’t really exists. When the world seems to descend into chaos, we will inevitably try to correlate signs that what we are seeing is part of a greater picture – perhaps the end of all things. Just as the coronavirus being coincident with earthquakes awakens us to the likelihood of some form of divine intervention, so it would have seemed, when the chaos of the Vietnam War was spreading to the streets of American and Europe, that a new war in Israel signaled the coming of the Apocalypse. In truth, we were simply seeing flare-ups in the Cold War that were possibility inevitable and mostly unrelated. Small consolation for a public mood already stretching towards a breaking point.

Herzog starts shortly before the British withdrawal. As such, I was treated to a written refresher of my earlier exercise. In some ways it was just a rerun, although I get a chance to look at things a little differently. Most notably, it surprises me how a loosely-organized citizen militia was able to take on multiple, established nation states and win. In many cases, a couple of dozen armed settlers held their own against regular forces. Herzog also highlights how the earliest attempts at operations by the Israelis were hampered by a lack of professional army discipline. Several times an attack failed because of an inability to coordinate the different pieces of the attack, an operational-planning capability that only came with experience.

As Herzog moves on to the Suez Crisis, he illustrates something that I struggled with when looking at the wargame depiction of this conflict. As I said at the time, it is nearly impossible to reproduce the historical results in a wargame. Israel’s defeat of fortified Egyptian positions was often the result of brilliant tactical maneuvering and “doing the impossible” on top of the factors that can modeled in games. Reading Herzog, I’m also impressed (again) with the difference in motivation between the two sides. For Israel, their struggle was for their very existence – both as a nation and (in the minds of many) personally. For the Arab nations, although many hated Israel and the Jews, they were still conscripted armies under the direction of authoritarian governments. One can imagine that the difference in will was a major factor in the lopsided Israeli victories.

As before, I plan to cycle through a handful of games and scenarios and link it all together with a master post. Herzog begins his 1967 war with the Sinai Campaign, and that also seems like a good starting point for me.

I’m still only at the beginning of The Legends of Eisenwald, but there is a form of quest that has been repeated a number of times. The player is introduced to three competing factions and tasked with achieving unity between the three. At some point, the game suggests there are three possibilities.

Convince two of them to join forces against the third;

Choose one of them, and help that one defeat the other two; or

Help one grow so powerful that the other two will set aside their difference to defeat him.

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal (link is probably paywalled) was titled How Obama Nudged Arab Leaders Toward Israel. In their write-up, the authors describe how Obama’s mishandling of the Arab Spring and the Iran nuclear weapons program caused Arab leaders (Egypt, Jordan, and to form closer ties to Israel.

From the article:

From the perspective of Arab leaders, [the Obama] administration supported the wave of political Islamism that engulfed the region in the Arab Spring’s aftermath. It also threatened their regimes in unprecedented ways by abandoning Egypt’s president Hosni Mubarak and slowing military exports to Saudi Arabia and Bahrain under the pretext of democratization. Worse, the administration signed a nuclear deal with Iran that reintegrated the ayatollahs’ regime into the international community while unleashing a wave of destabilization throughout the region.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu got the cold shoulder from Obama. This allowed him to use Israeli’s traditional role as an American insider to protest and push back against the administration’s missteps. In turn, this made him a natural leader among the other Middle Eastern states that, just as Israel, were harmed by the Obama policies.

The authors do not frame their piece as a criticism of Obama. It seems more to inform the readers of how the Arab-Israeli peace process has moved forward, while perhaps unwittingly, probably permanently. Reading it, I assume it is a cloaked criticism of Obama, but I could be wrong. Indeed, perhaps the former President out-thought us all. Perhaps he chose option number 3.

But seriously, it hardly seems like a prudent move to destabilize a region in order to goad the powers of that region to work towards peace, even if it turns out that is what has been achieved. The Wall Street Journal piece does not attempt to analyze whether the advance in Arab-Israeli relations outweighs the negatives (as summarized in the above quote).

It begs the question. Does this suggest that sometimes the United States is better off doing nothing? For decades, the U.S. has brought Arab and Israeli adversaries to our table in attempt to force them into agreements. In doing so, were we helping to define their adversarial relationship? I have to wonder if there was any way to achieve the positives of Obama’s result without the negative consequences, or does it really take a crisis before people (both leaders and the rest of us) are willing to rethink their entrenched positions?

Also coming off of Netflix this week, Above and Beyond, a documentary about the foreign pilots (mostly the Americans) who aided the Israelis in their 1948 War of Independence.

Technically, the movie is well done. It was produced by Nancy Spielberg, the youngest sister of Steven Spielberg, and benefits from access to Spielberg’s Industrial Light & Magic. Historical footage (and an impressive array thereof) is combined with computer generated combat footage and live re-enactments to tell the various stories. Interviews with a number of still-living pilots and relatives rounds out the narrative. This includes commentary from Pee Wee Herman, whose father flew for Israel in the war.

The depth of the story fills in a lot of blanks from when I was reading about the war earlier this year. In particular, when I played with the Arab Israeli Wars solitaire rules, I was always struck by the huge superiority of the Palivar card relative to the Egyptian air force, knowing as I did equipment procurement problems that the Israeli’s faced. The Egyptians had British-supplied aircraft totaling dozens of planes. The Israelis scrounged together what they could.

The core of their air power, shortly after the declaration of Independence, were what one of the pilots in the documentary describe as Messer-shits. The planes mostly came through Czechoslovakia, which was just about the only country desperate enough for dollars to defy the American arms embargo. Even what planes were smuggled out of the United States* often wound up in Czechoslovakia as a staging point. Czechoslovakia had, as a result of the Nazi occupation, a Messerschmidt manufacturing facility, where they continued to produce Me-109s post war. The problem was, they didn’t have all the pieces of the supply chain, and the fighters produced were of low quality overall and were cobbled together from what parts were available.

Despite the disparity, Israel (if I’m following the narrative correctly) halted both the Egyptian invasion and the Iraqi invasion using four Me-109s. The effect was primarily psychological. It was known by all that Egypt’s air force would be unopposed, so when Israeli began flying actual fighter aircraft, it had to be assumed that there were any number more where they came from. Thus, the Israeli air force, such as it was, had a decisive impact on the outcome of the war whereas the Egyptian Air Force simply did not.

The fact that American World War II veterans were flying those planes seemed to more than make up for the deficiency in equipment.

In probably goes without saying, but the movie tells the story of the war from the Israeli perspective. Whether this provides an accurate picture or not would surely be a subject for hot debate, within the right crowd. What is clear from the movie is that those involved – both the Israelis themselves and the Americans fighting with them – genuinely believed that failure in that war could mean another Holocaust. Nearly seven decades down the road we might dismiss much of the Arab rhetoric as bluster. At the time, particularly to those who had just survived the German death camps, it would have been prudent to take such threats at face value.

This, again, was a movie that had been in my queue for some time. I guess I have to thank Netflix for yanking it, as it was worth the time to watch.

*Apparently, to reduce the post-World War II surplus, war veterans were given the opportunity to purchase aircraft for mere thousands of dollars – far below there actual cost. A good chunk of the Israeli Air Force was acquired this way. Although legal to buy, the planes were illegal to export.

In the last post I complained that, although the TOAW scenario gives a good overall picture of the encounters in the 1956 war, it does not convey the “feeling” of this fighting, and which would require gaming at a finer level.

Back near the beginning of this series, I dug out my Arab Israeli Wars (the board game) and set up scenario B-1. Apparently, I’m not alone as there are many games that look at that battle, several of them having been directly inspired by the Avalon Hill scenario. The board game is not designed for solitaire play, and this scenario in particular does not lend itself for playing without an opponent. Nevertheless, when I set it up and fiddled around with it for a little bit, it immediate began to look like an Israeli victory.

Being scenario B-as-in-Basic #1, you would think you’d find it a simple, well-balanced scenario suitable for new players learning the game. It does not appear to be this; my impressions of the scenario find it extremely tilted toward the Israelis. See this thread at Board Game Geek for a bit of discussion on the scenario. I suppose it may have another purpose. A section of the design notes begins with a story of an October, 1973 battle where 5 Israeli tanks are sent to engage 40 Syrian T-55s. After 45 minutes (a typical scenario length in this type of game), half of the Syrian tanks were destroyed and the remaining retreated, without a single Israeli loss. One wonders if part of the purpose of B-1 is simply to demonstrate the massive superiority of Israeli armored doctrine, even when “the numbers” suggest an advantage to the other side.

Divided Attention

The first computer version I played was for Divided Ground. As I mentioned in my previous look at Arab Israeli War scenario conversions, these scenarios contain extensive design notes. In those design notes, the author makes a comment that the purpose of his conversions are to implement the board game scenarios. If a player wants good Divided Ground scenarios, either versus the computer or to compete with an opponent, he says they should look to the scenarios supplied with the game. This conversion may be a good example of what he is talking about.

A turkey shoot. Despite the “light tank” designation, the superior gun (and doctrine) of the AMX-13 makes short work of the Egyptian T-34/85s.

The victory conditions, rewarding destruction of the enemy and the success or failure of traversing the board within the allotted time, are reproduced faithfully. But a problem in this conversion seems to be that the computer opponent doesn’t really understand them.

Assuming that the scenario is, in fact, winnable as the Arabs, the key would be to use terrain to ambush the approaching Israeli’s once they are in range. Using such a strategy, the computer version might make it possible for Arab units to remain hidden (via the fog of war feature) until they are close enough to neutralize the range advantage of the Israelis. Instead, the AI Arab player seemed to bunch up his units, leaving them in place to be destroyed at leisure from a distance. Even more glaring, the Arab player dealt with the exit conditions by stacking his units on the exit hexes, making them easy targets once good firing positions were determined.

Steel Panthers: MBT

The Star and the Crescent

Command Ops 2

Battlefield size*: 40km x 12km
Game length: ~12 hours
Unit: Platoon

Moving on to the Steel Panthers version, we again encounter a scenario “inspired by” the Avalon Hill scenario, rather than being actually based off of it. The mix of tanks are about right, but there are far fewer (owing to the smaller scale). Here terrain doesn’t have the same feel. While the sand and rocky hills are still there, it doesn’t have the “hexside” ridges of the board game.

The inspiration does take one odd form. The map layout is with North to the left and a fairly narrow playing space West-to-East. On the top (that is, West) edge of the map is the Suez Canal, not used in the game. You might recall that the original scenario uses the Suez Canal mapboard to add extra playing space, but the canal features themselves are not playable. The battle took place quite a ways distant from the canal, and it is only in this scenario because the board game must create all of the battles using the same four mapboards.

One other oddity. The battalion commander has a jeep at his disposal. For some reason, when moved, the jeep makes horse noises. Fortunately for my sanity, the jeep got stuck in the sand within the first few minutes of play.

The scenario said to play from the Egyptian side. Maybe I should have paid attention.

The scenario played out much as the Divided Ground. Kills were made at long range with very little own-losses. In a similar way, the enemy bunched up around a couple of victory locations, where they were subsequently destroyed.

I Want to Love You, But…

The 2005 release from Shrapnel Games, The Star and The Crescent promises to be what we’re all looking for here. While primarily focused on later wars, it too has a Bir Gifgafa scenario for 1956. Immediately on start, we notice the increased use of realism in this version. Instead of randomly-generated desert or a reproduction of “Board D,” the scenario is played using a Soviet contour map of the battlefield. Unfortunately, it is a 1980s Soviet map of the battlefield so, for example, it has a airfield that didn’t exist in 1956. A hint of things to come.

The Star and the Crescent itself the fifth game released on that engine, which started with BCT: Brigade Combat Team or BCT: Commander (depending on the version) from 1998. While I didn’t collect ’em all, as they say, I do have several versions of this system. This game system is the one that finally drove me over the edge regarding left-handed mouse issues in gaming. Much of the Shrapnel line has long insisted on making the mouse buttons non-configurable. In this series it was particularly galling to me because the interface is so mouse-click intensive.

Amazingly, there is a particular combination of installations and patches that solves the problem. My computer has both The Star and the Crescent and Air Assault Task Force, installed together and both patched up to the latest post-release versions. Running with both, and then launching the TSatC executable (with the current patch) presents a native windows interface. Launching from the AATF executable presents a custom GUI that defiantly eschews integration with Windows. The mouse buttons are locked, as is the screen resolution. Several times in the past I’ve gotten stuck on that interface, unwilling to try to learn the actual game. Fortunately, this time around, I stumbled upon the workaround.

But once the game starts running, we find other problems. It is not a pretty game, by anyone’s definition. But that’s OK. Pretty isn’t necessarily what we’re after. The game was sold as a hard-core sim for hard-core wargamers, so it must be judged as such. The problem is, again, the user interface. At start, all units are halted and without orders. Trying to assign those order tumbles one into a nightmare-like cycle where orders are given, wait, no they weren’t, try again. There, got it. Nope. Try again.

The blue highlighted in green is the lead company of AMX-13s. The black squares to my NW are the enemy that I dispatched, while losing two of my own (gray squares). The blue squares back up the road to the NE are so far behind because of trouble getting orders. Note the ghost-of-the-future airfield to my South.

Suddenly one vehicle out the unit starts moving… but not the rest. Oops, wrong click – try again.

I suppose I should be spending more time with the written manual. But every time I read the manual, the prose regales me with how easy and intuitive the user interface is, rather than giving me the secret to overcoming its hurdles.

Ultimately, once all the units have the right orders – the desired formation, a path plotted in roughly the right direction, and not halted, subsequent orders become a little easier. It is simpler to modify existing orders than it is to create new ones.

A section from a 1959 US Military map of the Sinai hints at what we are up against. “Very Sharply Undulating” terrain. Another section, closer to the battlefield, describes “Sand Dunes 30 to 45 meters high.”

The simulation certainly does seem to be well done. Modeling looks to be at the level of individual shots from individual vehicles. The control, however, can be per vehicle or at the higher-level commands using formations. The friendly UI isn’t at the level where units can take their own initiative, but the game is best played giving orders at the company level and leaving the computer to execute them. The modeling of the map seems to be well done also. The terrain modeling appears to be at a finer detail than most games at this scale, leaving a battlefield peppered with undulations and providing complex fields of fire to navigate.

Pretty much done. The red Xs are killed enemies and the blue Xs are killed friendlies. My units (the blue armor symbol) are headed towards the end of that objective arrow.

Results were similar to the other three versions of this battle. The Israeli armor dominated the battlefield, dispatching the enemy with minimal friendly losses. Engagement distances were closer than the previous versions, something I attribute to the finer-grained modeling of the terrain. I do also notice the max-range for all tank guns is set at 1600, shorter than in the other games and closer than some of the kills in Steel Panthers.

In digging through the statistics, I came across another issue I have with the scenario. The scenario puts a 90mm gun on the AMX-13. This is an upgrade that the French were rolling out in the 1950s, but if the Israelis had any at the time of the Suez Conflict, it was only one or two. All the information I’ve seen says the light tanks of the 7th Armor Brigade mounted the 75mm gun, sharing it with the M50 Super Shermans.

But wait, there’s more! Just as I was headed into the endzone, one more company of enemy armor appeared. Shouldn’t be an issue.

One big plus I’ll give this to the system. Once I killed a couple of the tanks in the above screen shot, the game ended. As the program described, it had now become impossible for the enemy to achieve its objectives. It saves the player from the unpleasantness of having to run out the clock on a scenario he knows is over.

The single 1956 scenario in this package may not represent the gaming system’s best face, so I’ll give The Star and the Crescent/Air Assault Task Forceanother look in the future.

Roll Your Own

The final look at this battle was using the editing tools of Command Ops 2 to recreate the situation. For an engine of its complexity, the scenario tools are surprisingly simple to work with. The game’s creator says his intention was that you could produce an interesting scenario in minutes, allowing you (for example) to imagine what a hypothetical meeting engagement between two arbitrary forces would look like. The details can be increased from there. There is a huge latitude for control of the AI (enemy and friendly) by setting the victory locations and this is a method that is vastly simpler than the scripted AI of other products. Under pressure from the users, everything in the engine is editable, allowing us to move from the WWII, Western Front setting to 1956 Egypt.

The most difficult part of the game to create fresh are the maps. Getting them right takes some time and effort. When I first started with some map creation, I was having trouble getting a non-Northern Europe based terrain. I decided to forgo it for this iteration, and used instead a user-created map for the battle of El Guettar.

Adding vehicles for the Arab Israeli War was fairly straightforward.

This was by far and away the best interface experience for playing this battle. I set the unit size for the battle to correspond to the board game/Divided Ground. Commands can be given at any level from that unit on up, including simply commanding the entire force. The typical game length for Command Ops tends to be pretty long. The larger forces and multiple objectives require several distinct planning/execution phases and, at least for me, it takes quite some time to play through. However, a small scenario like this plays out very quickly.

Engaged. Once again, the AI has clumped up their armor, this time at a choke point behind a Tunisian crossing. Judicious use of victory point location placement is what drives the AI in this game.

The battle went mostly as I’d expect. It ended up being a significant loss (although as I was haphazard assigning victory points, calculations of win and loss are probably not meaningful). The kill ratio was somewhat lopsided in favor of the Egyptians, and the Israelis failed to take the bridge. I’m left with a few conclusions about the use of this engine for post-WWII scenarios.

It is well suited to this time and place. The use of post-WWII equipment was not a stretch for the engine. However, this scenario does show where the limits of this system might be found.

The map seems to be on the larger size for a typical Command Ops battle, which as I’ve said tend to be multi-day affairs. Take a look the table near the top of this article. Granted the map was oversized for this battle, but we can see that this size battlefield is more like the multiple-hour versions of the battle rather than a multiple-days version (which would pretty much cover the whole war). While this might be the size of an area for an extended operation for a airborne assault force (using primarily foot movement) against a fortified defense, things are different when it comes to more modern mobile warfare.

As mobile warfare, including helicopters, continues to advance and modeling requires taking into account the improvements in communication and sensors in the 1960s and beyond, I foresee hitting big holes in what Command Ops can portray. And yet, there may continue to be a niche. Cold War era conflicts like the Iran-Iraq War also were also throwbacks to World War II weapons and technologies, so the engine might be a match for some other, later battles.

While creating the map may be the hardest part of the process, it may also be the most important when in comes to immersion and the fun factor. In this version of the scenario, failure to take the crossing seems almost meaningless. In the real battle, there was no bridge and there was no river. The opportunity for the player to connect with the historical circumstance is difficult unless the battlefield itself is actually recreated.

Clearly the advantage in Israeli gunnery and tactics is not property modeled. I used data for the German 75mm tank projectile, which does slightly outperform the Soviet guns. But it wasn’t enough. A good bit of tweaking is almost certainly in order here.

Hopefully I’ll find the wherewithal to work some more with this concept before I’m done. With a little bit of work, I think I could see much better results. Furthermore, the 1956 Arab-Israeli War in general is even more suited to Command Ops than this particular scenario. The use of paradrops to seize objectives, which then are rescued by mechanized forces, is very much the type of battle this series was originally designed to play.

*Regarding Battlefield Size and Duration. Since I set this up myself, it isn’t really representative. The map I used is much bigger that shown, but the roughly 40km x 12km rectangle is where all of the fighting will take place. Likewise the battle would never last for 12 hours of fighting. But I needed to set start and end times, so I just gave it most of the day.